I’m working towards supporting subclassing pathlib.Path for things like zip/tar archives, iso files, S3, etc. This was first brought up a few years ago in bpo-24132 and discussed further on the python-ideas forum.

Before I can approach the meat of the issue, I'd like to land a handful of backwards-compatible patches that tidy up the pathlib internals. These are:

• #19220 / bpo-39924: Handle missing os functions more consistently in pathlib
• #18838 / bpo-39895: Move pathlib.Path.touch() implementation into the path accessor
• #19342 / bpo-40038: Remove partial support for preserving accessor when modifying a path
• #18841 / bpo-39899: Make pathlib use os.path.expanduser() to expand home directories
• #18834 / bpo-39659: Route calls from pathlib.Path to os.getcwd() via the path accessor
• #18864 / bpo-39906: Add follow_symlinks parameter to pathlib.Path.stat() and chmod()
• #24294 / bpo-42999: Expand and clarify pathlib.Path.link_to() documentation

Could I please request review of these patches? A couple may already be ready to land.

(I appreciate they’re a little dry. This is all prep work for the introduction of a shiny new class, tentatively named ‘AbstractPath’).

Thanks!

Barney